Re: slow makefiles are getting even slower

[Richard Boulton]

On Thu, 2002-08-15 at 10:59, Zdenek Kabelac wrote:
> I've proposed several times few things which would certainly 
> drasticaly improve the speed - though they are for different
> parts of auto* tools project - there were some reactions - but
> so far non of them were realized and there is not visible any 
> progress here (and as I've said before the whole auto* stuff is getting
> constanly slower and more space consuming - not mentining the
> problems with backward compatibility).

Feel free to propose your ideas again.

While the complexity has been increasing over time, I'd like to point
out that some cases have been massively improved: for example, the
Gstreamer makefile.am used to take hours (literally) to be processed -
this has been fixed in more recent Automakes.

However, it would be nice to improve Automake's complexity in more
general cases.

One approach to reducing the complexity of the generated makefiles is to
move to a non-recursive style of Makefile.  This is supported to an
extent by more recent automakes (1.6+ certainly, I think 1.5 as well).

This involves having a single Makefile.am at the top of your project
which contains all the dependencies and targets for the whole project.
For maintainance purposes, you can split the Makefile.am by using the
automake "include " command to include fragments from other directories.

Unfortunately, it's not terribly neat at present, since this requires
full paths (from the top directory) to source files to be supplied. 
With a bit of effort you can make a reasonable system, though.

-- 
Richard